American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination is a cultural history of how two societies grappled with the legacies of their reliance on bound labor. Distinct from recent transnational historiography that follows historical actors and phenomena across the boundaries of nation-states, this book is a comparative history in the more traditional sense: it is the author, not the historical actors she studies, who connects the histories of the United States and Russia. Justifying her comparative take, Bellows contends that “by placing the post-emancipation eras of these two nations in comparative perspective, we glean useful information not apparent from the separate study of each country” (3). It is not clear that the book's conclusions about Russian and American cultural history after emancipation would be unattainable without the comparative frame. (Bellows's interpretations of the US materials, with which this reviewer is more familiar, are certainly in line with what others...